The Guardian Ch 4

Disclaimer: Mass Effect and Destiny belong to BioWare and Bungie

Chapter 4

A couple of minute's of just staring into space after the shocking revelations we just found I start taking a deep breath in, and then a slow breath out, getting as relaxed as possible, trying to center myself, trying to empty my mind.

Even after all this, the one thing I still have is my Light, I can still feel my connection to it. As long as I have my Light then there is still hope. For now though I just need to find a place of familiarity, I feel the Light now, all around me, I let myself slowly fall into it let it embrace me completely.

Finally once I'm fully submerged, I can feel them, my powers that the Light has gifted me in my constant battles as an Guardian. The warm heat of the Solar, with its burning passion and healing after glow, the energetic and unrelenting power of the Arc, and the Void, with its unquenchable hunger and its beauty of the unknown.

Feeling myself phase through their grips, letting them express themselves through me. Finding comfort in their embrace, knowing that even in another reality they will still be there when I call for them. Breath in, hold... breath out,

pulling myself out slowly. It's time to face the world and to find out whats my next plan of action. Just in time to I can hear Dot calling for me. "Aeon, it's done." I must have been meditating for awhile, its been at least an hour and a half.

Getting up and heading to Dot, I find her updating the main monitor giving me a summary for now. Well probably go over it in depth once we've calmed down. "How's it looking Dot... " she turns and starts to hover towards me as I go for the seat. "It's amazing, during the download I was skimming through everything and I'm happy to say that while we are in another reality there are still humans here... " feeling sweet relief flow through my body she goes on to explain to me "though there is no Traveler here and we seem to have gone back in time as well." Now I'm giving her this look of disbelief.

She's just nodding her head at me while continuing on "the current year for earth and humanity is 2181, and humans have been traveling through space since 2148." She goes to the screen and starts pulling up archive's of humanities timeline in space. "It seems that when humans made it to Mars they didn't find the traveler there, instead they found an alien bunker, Prothean, is what they called them." She starts pulling up articles of when humans found this bunker.

I'm now reading through some of whats on the screen while paying close attention to what Dot is saying "in that bunker they found the same anomaly that you saw in the asteroid, it was a new element, an element that when subjected to an electrical current, releases dark energy which can be manipulated into a mass effect field, raising or lowering the mass of all objects within that field." She reads that word for word from the screen.

Nodding my head along with her "so instead of finding the Traveler on Mars they found, what, magic space stones instead?" Giving me this look that she doesn't find "magic space stones" to be as funny as I would. "Yes... and they called this element, element zero or "eezo", they found a cache of it and some prothean blueprints for an eezo drive core so they can make faster than light travel." She keeps scrolling through the article till she got to an image that we just saw in person, the giant tuning fork. "In the information they obtained from the bunker they also learned that Pluto wasn't a planet, but was instead it was this, a Mass Relay." She hovers in front of me and out of her optical eye port shoots out a 3d rendition of the relay and continues on "ships with a eezo core have one problem though, they are limited on how fast there FLT can go before they overheat and leak out radiation." A ship then comes in to the 3d image showing it approach the relay, then the relay powers up and shoots the ship like a gun to Light know where. "In order to truly go interstellar they must rely on these relay's"

Gaining an questioning look. "Why? How fast can they go without the relay's?" She closes the 3d image and turns to me "off of there own drive cores there fastest ship can probably go 13-18 light years a day... " she says this with a disappointed sigh at the end. "Unfortunately after a certain distance they have to vent all of their heat and radiation, so instead it actually take longer then even that." Shaking my head "so its nice for in system jumps, maybe even another system close by, but for long distance they would have to use these relay's?"

She goes back to the screen and while pulling up a new article "yes, they make something like an interstellar highway... " she then pulls up a planet called Shanxi. "For while humanity was expanding to the stars, colonizing worlds after worlds, until the "First Contact War" happened." War, that word alone caught my attention, now this was no longer a moment of wonder at something new and exciting, the Guardian inside me was now called to attention. Even Dot has calmed down and looks at me with all seriousness "on the colony world of Shanxi, humanity was doing a routine search through a new and unused relay, a relay that's now being called Relay 314, they had first contact with an alien species, violent first contact." Dot then closes that article all together and opens up another one titled "Relay 314 incident" on the screen was avian alien, humanoid in appearance, looking like a featherless bird. "The species they met were called Turians, a militaristic species, working under a galactic government, operated by the Citadel Council."

She starts scrolling down, "the Turians apparently were working under the assumption that they were pirates who were breaking one of the rule's of the Citadel, that rule being, not to activate or open a unknown or unused relay, something about "Rachni" I'll explain that to you later." Sitting in silence, just digesting everything she says, I then turn to her and ask "if they thought we were pirates they should have learned real quick after the attack that they were not pirates?" Turning back to the screen, taking the Turian physiology in, looking for weaknesses to exploit. Seeing that they have a almost metallic carapace and start thinking of armor piercing weapons to use on them.

Dot acknowledged my question saying in a sad tone "they did at one point, but decided that we still broke Citadel law and needed to be punished, so they continued on with the attack." Turning sharply to her, starting to feel some anger try to break its way out "you mean to tell me that they still attacked us for a law we didn't even know existed?!" Catching myself since I almost growled that out in anger. "Yes, they pressed on the attack, stating that we were to young of a race and didn't know of the dangers we could have caused so they wanted to bring us to heel... " Dot sounds and looks even more defeated then last time, and I don't blame her, a new reality and humanity still has to face the threat of genocide.

Catching my breath and calming myself down enough to keep a clear head I ask "if the Turians didn't stop the attack then who did, because if humanity was still at war you would have told me that first." She starts to pick herself up and nods her head "yes, your right I would have made that our number one priority, luckily for us it seems like the Citadel caught wind of what was happening and another of the council species took action to stop this war before it escalated into a full blown genocidal war." She changes the screen again to a new species, and I'm shocked, they almost look human, but there still so alien. "The new species was a mono-gender race called the Asari."